About Kfir Pravda

Posts by Kfir Pravda:

Job description:
1. Manage ongoing digital marketing activities with international and local clients
2. Find and manage suppliers and vendors
3. Work internally with development, creative and content professionals
4. Support sales and business development processes

We are located in Tel Aviv, Ramat Hachayal

Full time position

Our Ideal Candidate:

You have a strong passion for media, marketing, and getting others excited. You are a hard working self starter and motivated individual, who get things done. You solve problems, and are considered an out of the box and creative thinker.

You should also have experience in working with clients in Israel and abroad and with a variety of vendors and service providers.
We are a B2B/B2C digital agency, with publicly traded international clients. We believe that the relations between brands, companies and customers are changing fundamentally, and there is a need for a new breed of marketeers that understand different platforms, know how to integrate them, and how to create value to for customers and brands/companies alike.

If we work together, you will create and execute multi-platform digital and real life projects that challenge traditional advertising and PR industry.

The technology was of interest to a number of acquirers, including Zappos.com which tried to buy it, and Kumar rounded up a group of angels for its first funding–a $500,000 angel round in August/September 2009.

The only problem—another start-up, Like.com, was doing something similar. Modista’s technology was better, according to Kumar….. But Like.com had a patent on product applications of computer vision. Like.com, which was well-funded with $47 million in venture backing, filed a lawsuit against Modista the day before its funding was going to close. (Like.com was later acquired by Google in August 2010, showing the value of the idea.)…The lawsuit caused investors including Kumar to drop out, for fear of dealing with an expensive lawsuit that could cost more than they had even planned to invest. Because Modista had no money to defend the suit in court, the company later shut down.

So where is the news here? Companies are built to win, not to be nice.

I love Techdirt. Their cynical writing style is fun to read. Their in-depth knowledge is amazing. But they are missing the point in their post about entertainment industry:

Gatekeepers don’t make much sense.

Actually they do. In a world where media distribution was complex and expensive, gatekeepers enabled the whole industry to exist. But now, the internet is changing the game, as Mike says clearly in his post:

But the amazing thing about the internet is that it knocks down fences and walls with ease.

In a world without fences there are still gatekeepers – they are just different ones. Facebook and Google are the new gatekeepers. We need them. We need them to help us find what we want and communicate with our friends. By providing this value they become the new gatekeepers.

I fully agree with Mike’s statement, that the entertainment industry doing as much as possible to cripple innovation. These guys are not ready yet to change their business model. It is probably because there isn’t any viable alternative that will provide the same revenues and profits. But there is no free love – when one gatekeeper collapse, another one is taking its place.

I was really looking forward to see a major company releasing a proper contender to the iPad. RIM looked like the best one to do just that. But Walt has some bad news:

“….But that isn’t the biggest distinction between the PlayBook and the other tablets. This first edition of the PlayBook has no built-in cellular data connection and lacks such basic built-in apps as an email program, a contacts program, a calendar, a memo pad and even RIM’s popular BlackBerry Messenger chat system.
To get these features with your $500 PlayBook, you must use it with a nearby BlackBerry phone connected to it wirelessly over a short-range Bluetooth connection. Once this link is made, these critical applications pop up on the PlayBook’s screen, via a system called Bridge.
But these are essentially ghosts of the same apps on the phone. In my tests, I could use them from the tablet, where they looked nicer, and they did synchronize with the phone. But when I broke the connection, the apps became grayed-out and the data they held disappeared. It is all stored on the phone….”

The Israeli Export Institute, New Media Branch, is organizing a delegation to News Corp and Time Warner. Israeli companies participating in the delegation will meet decision makers in these leading media companies. Key technologies of interest include Internet TV, innovative user interfaces, multi platform solutions and location based services.

The good news is that it is an affordable business development event. The bad news is that last application date is TOMORROW.

On the 28th of February I had the honor to participate in one of the most important events I’ve ever been a part of – The Future of Non-Profit.

The event, created and managed by Shoshanna Jaskoll and Dave Weinberg from Causil, explored the challenges of non-profits in the 21st century, from business models, to organization, to fund raising, to marketing.

I was heading a panel about Social media and its value to non profits. It followed an excellent presentation by Miriam Schwab about site design and online presence for non profits as well.

The panel was based on a great team of pros – Florence Broder, Social Media Manager, Jewish Agency For Israel,Hadassah Levy from Jewish Ideas Daily, and Dvir Reznik, blogger and marketing manager of an interesting startup called Onavo (if you are traveling a lot, you should check their site).

We discussed the pros and cons of social media marketing for non profits. Florence gave examples of how her involvement in social media helped recently immigrated jews coming to ISreal and facing beuracrqacy challenges. Hadassah talked about social media as traffic source for media sites. And Dvir discussed the value that bloggers and Twitter provide for companies and organizations with limited budget.

Things got interesting when a member of the audience, asked the million dollar question – why should an organization invest in social media, with no clear ROI. More

Couple of days ago I ran across Atavist, a simple and well designed iPad app. This application is simple. You download it for free, but every story you’d like to read costs ~$3. What you get for your hard earned cash is an in depth article, 12,000 words length, with additional multimedia content. All storied are non fiction, and based on long and in depth research. The writers are well known journalists, writing for Wired and The New Yorker.
As an avid fan of crime films, I bought the story of a famous bank heist in Sweden. The long and detailed story included videos from the heist itself, photographs of the suspects, maps of the event, timeline and more.

I am intrigued by the business model of this publication. Selling individual articles was a model that was discussed in the past. I didn’t believe in it, but the fact that I bought the story, read it from beginning to end, and would gladly pay again for interesting articles, makes me wonder if this model is more viable than I’ve expected. Is this another glimpse on the future of publishing? I am not certain yet. But in the mean time, go, download the app and judge it yourself.